“We’re a really good team,” said Alex Killorn, who scored two goals in Game 4. And it has given the Leafs the confidence they had lacked in so many postseason disappointments of recent seasons. The idea that they only have one win to show for all of that splendid hockey is jarring. They blew the Leafs out in Game 1, they dominated most of Game 3 and they were 10 minutes away from winning in a rout in Game 4. For the most part, the Lightning have been the better team in three of the four games. Only the heartiest of fans would have expected another Stanley Cup appearance this summer.īut this feels like a different kind of story. The Leafs were the better team in the regular season, and the favorite coming into the series.Īnd for all its accomplishments the past three seasons, Tampa Bay is a team that has been fighting the natural decline of salary-cap defections, injuries and age. The idea that Toronto is up 3-1 in the series is not the shocking part of this melodrama. Those are games that we can’t (let) slip away.” We’ve got to be better there and kind of have a reset. “They were playing with the puck a lot, and that’s on us. “That’s a good team over there, and they were pushing, they were making plays,” Lightning forward Anthony Cirelli said. The team that made a third consecutive run at the Stanley Cup in 2022 lost its well-earned aura in a meltdown that will surely be talked about for weeks, and maybe years, to come. The team that lifted the Stanley Cup again in 2021 lost a gut check against a group often derided as chokers. The team that tore through the 2020 postseason and raised the Stanley Cup without ever facing an elimination game lost a three-goal lead as quickly as a beer run.
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